In the night sky there’s a full moon over Squibnocket and I’m thinking about the far future. I can see the Big Dipper pointing to the polestar. I’m not starry-eyed, but I marvel at a sight beheld by virtually every human being who ever lived or ever will.
I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky…”
On a similar night a few years ago, I had dinner with my mother, and we stopped to admire the moon at Squibby on the way back to her house in Chilmark. It wasn’t the first time we had stopped there together to look at the moon and the beach for a minute or two of silent reverie. But now I’m thinking about something she said that night while gazing at the sky: she wished she knew more about science, and astronomy in particular. I hope I’m as curious when I’m in my eighties.
Looking into space thrusts the mind forward. The past is a single dense weave, impossible to fully know or to ignore; the future seems bigger and more open, like the sky. I wonder what the world will be like in fifty, a hundred, two hundred years. Beyond that, it’s hard even to imagine what I might be missing. It vexes me that I’ll never know.
Now I think of Whitman’s words: “On the beach at night alone / As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song / As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the cleft of the universes / and of the future.”
I wonder what my grandchildren may live to see that I will not, just as my grandparents missed the glories of laptops, cell phones and the internet — but also social media, passwords, usernames, verification codes and in-boxes, all of which make death more palatable.
Will our descendants feel wistful that we ached for the arrival of renewable energy and autonomous vehicles? Will they laugh at our infatuation with wind power, having removed all those wind turbines in local waters because something better came along? (Within fifty years, I’d bet.)
My gut tells me that the next few decades will be a rough ride, but after that things will begin to settle down and improve markedly. That’s my hope anyway; never mind the details.
I have little faith in human nature. Many of us are miserable creatures. I’ll brook no nonsense about innate human goodness. But I do have faith in our better angels, and our better institutions, to bring the worst human impulses further under control. So, I’m an optimistic misanthrope.
But back to reality: the moon and the stars, in case you didn’t know, are out there to make us wonder and think. The light is nice too. Tonight at Squibby, I’m also reminded of a poem called The More Loving One by W.H. Auden, which begins as follows: “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That, for all they care, I can go to hell, / But on earth indifference is the least / We have to dread from man or beast.”
It goes on like that, but there’s such a thing as copyright.
I’m pretty sure that our progeny will gaze at the sky, too, and wonder what is to come. All we can do is leave messages for them, letting them know where we’ve been and what we hoped for and wondered about. Maybe they too will become wanderers among the stars, stopping at Squibnocket, or wherever suits them, daring to feel awe and let the mind stray. I hope their curiosity is as endless as the night sky that nourishes it.
Jeff Scheuer lives in West Tisbury and New York.